The Watch (The Red Series Book 1)

by Amanda Witt

  “What do you think, Red?” Liza said. “Why’d they pick her?”

  I was sitting cross-legged on my top bunk, alone and a little apart from everyone else, trying not to look impatient but also doing nothing to keep the conversation going. “Just another way to freak us out,” I said. “No rhyme or reason.”

  “But Red, why would they need to freak you out?” That was Wanda, of course. “That nanny was playing favorites,” she continued. “They had a perfectly good reason to discipline her.”

  Liza snorted. “Oh yeah. A bullet to the head. That’ll teach her a lesson.”

  “Killed for picking pretty baby names,” Shawna said musingly.

  “It’s as bad as Lavinia, killed for being pretty,” Meri said, and then other voices went on, picking up the discussion, arguing. But I had heard something else.

  “What did you say?” I leaned over the edge of my bunk to look down at my bunkmate. Kari was sitting with her arms wrapped around her knees, and at my question she hugged herself more tightly, looking as if she wished she’d kept silent as usual.

  “It’s okay,” I whispered, swinging down to sit beside her. “Nobody else is listening. I thought you said, ‘she wasn’t killed for being pretty.’”

  Blushing, she nodded.

  “Why’d you say that?”

  Kari glanced around uneasily, but no one was paying us any attention. Liza and Wanda were going at it, each gathering supporters as she went.

  Kari leaned a little toward me. “It’s only . . . I work in the postnatal unit.”

  I nodded that I knew.

  “And Lavinia was a seamstress, and one of the other seamstresses had a baby last week, so she was in postnatal.”

  She broke off, and again I nodded encouragingly.

  “This other seamstress said that Lavinia sort of . . ..” Hastily Kari let go of her knees and waved a hand. “Not like the Watchers mean,” she said, and then once again stopped.

  I had no idea what she meant. “Go on,” I said, maybe a trifle less patiently than before. This was like pulling teeth.

  Kari flushed an even deeper red, but pushed on. “None of the seamstresses really thought about it, because Lavinia was so quiet. But after she died they were talking about how she’d been such a good listener. She didn’t say much, but now and then she asked just the right questions . . .”

  “Like Rafe, back when we were in school,” I said.

  Relieved, Kari nodded. “That’s it,” she said.

  “You mean that she didn’t say anything negative herself,” I went on, “but she asked questions that got people to thinking, and talking.”

  Kari nodded. “And when they talked—”

  She looked at me hopefully, and so again I waded forward. “And when they talked, they realized they didn’t trust the Watchers. Is that what you mean?”

  Kari nodded again. She pulled on a strand of hair, then took a deep breath. “And Mechanic Dane—he was . . .”

  “One of the men in the city meeting with her. I know.”

  “He told someone else I work with that those men weren’t fighting over Lavinia. He said that he . . . that she and he . . . ”

  “They had an understanding?”

  Kari nodded. “They had put in a request to live together. Those other men sort of hung around, because she was so pretty. And, well, Butcher Ross was very fond of her. He was sad she didn’t want to stay with him. But there wasn’t any conflict. He was just sad. That’s what Dane said, anyway.”

  “You overhear a lot, don’t you?” I said, and Kari looked like she wanted to hide under the covers.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I listen, too—though maybe not as well as you do.”

  Kari smiled faintly. “I blend into the background better,” she said.

  “Have you heard anything about the others who’ve been in city meetings?” I was thinking about Louie. He had caused trouble in his time. And Judd definitely had a rebellious streak. But they hadn’t died, so either the city meetings had somehow gone wrong, or I was off track. I probably was, since I really couldn’t fathom why naming a baby Denver would get someone killed.

  Kari was considering my question. She tucked her smooth dark hair behind her ears and then smoothed her blanket. Finally she looked at me. “Sometimes names are forbidden,” she said.

  I waited.

  “I don’t know why. But certain names come up again and again—different people suggest them—but when that happens, we’re supposed to reject the name and write in another. Call the baby something else.”

  “But why? What’s wrong with the names?”

  Kari shook her head, looking perplexed. “They don’t mean anything,” she said. “I don’t know why people even come up with them. Paris, that’s one. Plato. London. Jesus. Elvis.”

  We stared at each other. “Are those boy names or girl names?” I said.

  “Both. Either. I don’t know. There are others, but I can’t think of them right now.”

  “Did the nanny mother who died suggest those names?”

  Kari shook her head. “Yes. No. I suppose maybe sometimes . . . but other people did, too. And the names she died for aren’t on the forbidden list.”

  Two bunks over, Lea had started crying again. Most of us had long ago given up on keeping Lea calm, but Linni abruptly stopped echoing everything Wanda said, and bent over the girl. “Why don’t you get in bed?” she said. “I’ll tuck you in and tell you a story, like the nanny mothers used to do.”

  Lea nodded and moved to her own bunk, which, as bad luck would have it, was next to Kari. Wanda’s beady little eyes followed Lea, and when she saw me sitting with Kari, she leaned over and whispered something to her minion Joy.

  “Let me know if you think of anything else,” I told Kari, and climbed back up to my bed.

  Over by the door Shawna spoke up. “There’s no point in driving ourselves crazy trying to figure out the Watchers. I’m going to sleep.” I threw her a quick glance but she carefully avoided my eyes, turning over and pulling her blanket up around her neck.

  To my relief the rest of the dormitory followed her lead, and soon the room was silent. The dorm mother never came in to turn off the light, so eventually Liza did it.

  I waited until everyone was lying still and breathing evenly. Then I waited until Meri got up for her requisite almost-asleep-and-realized-she-had-to-go bathroom visit. Then I waited until Linni began snoring softly, and until the girl in the bunk beside her poked her so she’d roll onto her side. Then I counted to one thousand.

  Finally I was confident no one in the room was awake except for me. Cautiously I eased out of my bunk, found my coat on the floor, and crept across the room.

  From the bottom bunk nearest the door, Shawna waved at me as I passed.

  Chapter 17

  I needn’t have been in such a rush. I waited for Meritt for ages, shivering in the darkness, seeing now and then the headlights of a patrol car flashing across the cafeteria yard.

  The Watchers were systematically weeding out rebels—that had to be the method behind their terrorizing. Louie hadn’t died, but maybe Butcher Stuart was a troublemaker too, so the Watchers were happy whichever died. Judd and Petey? That one I couldn’t figure out, nor the nanny mother.

  And if the Watchers were killing off rebels, why didn’t they announce what they were doing? It seemed like that would make people more likely to behave.

  I stood there shivering, trying to make sense of things, until finally Meritt arrived. He didn’t come all the way to where I waited, but gestured from across the yard, and I left the shadows and followed him to the foot of the watchtower.

  At the prison door, I whispered, “You’re sure there’s only one warden?”

  “One upstairs,” he said. “We’ll have to avoid any others.”

  Great.

  Meritt swung open the door and slipped inside. I followed, anxiety a tight band around my lungs. The long tiled hallway was deserted, but lights shone from beneath two o
f the doors.

  Swiftly we hurried down the hall to the stairway door at the far end. Meritt was opening it—he was inside, and I was just behind him—when we heard it.

  The crack of a whip, and the sharp hard exhalation of someone in pain.

  I looked at Meritt. He gestured to me to come on and started up the stairs, walking as softly as he could so the metal grillwork wouldn’t creak and echo. I could be quieter; I was lighter, and I was barefoot.

  I started to follow him, but the whip cracked again and I hesitated, peering down the empty hallway. It must be nearby—must be the lighted doorway just a few yards away. I took one step toward it, two.

  A man’s voice, calm and deliberate, spoke. “You might as well tell me now,” he said. “While you have a little skin left.”

  “Nothing to tell.” The voice was hoarse, but I knew it. Farrell Dean.

  I shut my eyes as the whip cracked again.

  Behind me I heard the main door to the prison begin to open. In two steps I was at the stairway, through the door, running softly up and up, listening for the sound of pursuit behind me. No sounds came. Whoever it was hadn’t entered the stairwell.

  I could hardly think straight. Were they beating him because of me—because of the warden with the scar? I couldn’t bear the thought, but the alternative was even worse. If they were beating him because of the spying and sabotaging, they’d call him a traitor, a cancer.

  We had to get him out.

  Though surely they wouldn’t kill him, not their best mechanic. Optica needed him.

  My thoughts were racing when I pushed open the door at the top of the stairs, the door to the Opticon observatory. Meritt was already inside, bending over a slumped warden, the same one from the night I’d been there before. Zee, that was his name. Meritt had him under the arms and was hauling him away from the bank of equipment, propping him in one of the comfortable chairs.

  The door didn’t have a lock, but it opened inward, so I took hold of another chair and dragged it across the door. It wouldn’t stop anyone for long, but it would buy us a few seconds. To do what, I didn’t know—we were completely cornered up here. “Meritt—” I began, intending to tell him about Farrell Dean, but he cut me off.

  “Let me concentrate,” he said. Swiftly he pulled his small tools from his pocket and began to work, removing a cover, changing settings by flipping miniature switches. Then he sat down and began typing on the keyboard. One of the screens went dark, then flared green. Lines of incomprehensible words and numbers began to scroll down it.

  “They won’t be meeting this late,” I whispered, glancing at the warden, but Meritt merely waved at me to hush. He put on the headphones and typed a command, watched the scrolling text, typed another. His eyes lit up.

  “Got it,” he said, gesturing for me to come closer. He pulled one earphone away from his head and I heard voices. Then he touched a key and the voices stopped.

  “I recorded them from earlier,” he said, looking up at me. “You know how the general system works, right? The Watcher compound has a bank of screens identical to this one so they can see all over the city, and they can also watch whoever is here.”

  I glanced around uneasily.

  “They aren’t watching us now,” Meritt said. “They’re all asleep.” He pointed to a screen showing a long table and seven empty chairs, and, at the far end of that room, a bank of screens like the one in front of me. As I watched, that image flipped to a different scene: the city circle, empty in the moonlight.

  “Besides, I’ve spliced in a loop from yesterday. If anyone looked now, they’d see the warden sitting there playing cards.” Meritt looked at me, making sure I was paying close attention. “So here’s what we’ve done. I put together a voice-activated application and recording camera component. It piggybacks on their central computer. I had to loop it so I wouldn’t use too much—never mind about that. The main thing is, just now I remote accessed it, and now I’m going to play back whatever it caught this evening. And next time it’ll be even easier—I’ve set up a shortcut, do you see? All I’ll have to do next time is this.” He tapped three keys. “Great, isn’t it?”

  Behind us the warden was snoring gently. I turned so I could keep an eye on him. “Meritt,” I began again, determined to tell him about Farrell Dean, but then the top left screen filled with the same table and chairs we’d seen a moment before. Now, however, the chairs were filled by seven people dressed in white.

  Immediately—to my later shame—I forgot all about Farrell Dean.

  These were the men and women who ruled my life, the men and women who watched every move I made, and I had never before seen them. These were the Watchers.

  I leaned forward over Meritt’s shoulder and studied them. There were four men and three women. They all sat on the same side of the table. The men sat together to the left, and the women sat together on the right.

  Except for their white clothes, they looked completely ordinary—more or less like anybody else in Optica. They were all older, with white hair or gray hair, and some had backs bent slightly with arthritis. They didn’t look terribly wise or even terribly important. They just looked like people.

  A plump woman with short gray hair was chuckling. “Did you see their faces?” she said, leaning forward. “They were completely baffled. They have no idea where those names came from. They think the nanny made them up. The nanny herself thinks she made them up.”

  “The past bleeds through,” another woman said, languidly stroking a finger across the table in front of her. “Memories don’t stay buried. That has always been a problem. It’s one more reason to euthanize the old ones.”

  “And a very good reason,” the plump woman said. “We can’t afford memories, especially not now.”

  “How many more city meetings before we do it?” This was a short, round man.

  “One or two more should be enough,” another man said. He had a very long face and was looking at a paper on the table in front of him. “Except for the redhead that first night, nobody has lifted so much as a finger. They’re completely cowed. But it’s best to be sure.”

  “That redhead is a problem, and in more ways than one.” This was a man who looked so old I was surprised he could sit upright. “One of the wardens has been asking rather nosy questions about her.”

  Meritt glanced over his shoulder at me, raising an eyebrow. I grimaced, repressing a shudder. He still didn’t know about the scarred warden, and I wanted to keep it that way.

  “We always knew she raised dangerous questions,” the plump woman said. “How could she not, with that hair?”

  The old man frowned. “She was a practical joke,” he said. “One that has never been funny. We should have disposed of her long ago. An accident, an illness. It would have been safer that way.”

  I froze, one hand on Meritt’s shoulder.

  “Absolutely not,” said the woman on the end, her voice sharp. To my surprise I recognized Marta, the woman from the cafeteria truck. She was a Watcher?

  Hastily I scanned the other faces again; no, I didn’t recognize anyone else.

  “No,” the languid woman agreed. “We were obligated to give her a chance. Joke or not—and you’re no doubt correct about that—she was, nevertheless, our best hope for subsequent subjects. There have been so few.”

  “She’s still our best hope,” Marta said. “And therefore well worth the risk. Meritt certainly would agree.”

  Meritt? I shot him a glance, but he shrugged and kept his eyes on the screen.

  “At the risk of stating the obvious, Meritt isn’t here,” the old man said, waving a hand at the room. “And if he were, and we explained the situation, he’d certainly understand that at this point the girl is far more trouble than she’s worth.”

  “I agree,” the plump woman said. “Enough is enough. And we’ve kept a close eye on her. We’ll have her records, if we ever need them, though at this point that seems highly unlikely.”

  “Exactly,” said
the long-faced man. “At this point the number one priority is our survival. Not the redhead, not the records, not anything else. And I really don’t think anyone at all could possibly disagree. Lives are at stake.”

  “All this discussion is pointless,” the languid woman said, and yawned. “We all know that one way or another, the redhead won’t be a problem much longer.”

  “I’m going to keep saying this until the rest of you show sense.” Marta was angry. “It is essential that we keep her.”

  “But why?” the plump woman said, spreading her hands. “She’s nothing but a waste of resources, a loose end, a loose cannon.”

  “She’s undisciplined,” the round Watcher agreed.

  “Quite,” said the very old man. “And if Optica is to survive, it must recapture its original discipline, its original efficiency.”

  Marta threw up her hands in exasperation. “Efficient? Optica? We never had to worry about that. We certainly never had to worry about being self-sustaining. That was never the point. People like Estelle, Louie, all of them—including the redhead—they were the point.”

  “Yes, Marta, we know,” said the plump woman, rolling her eyes. “Please recall that we were on this council long before you came along.”

  Marta smiled a little grimly. “Which means you just might be too close to the problem,” she said. “Or a bit too attached to your role. Whereas I, as a relative newcomer, have retained a little healthy distance.”

  “And what do you think we should do?” the round man said. “Give up all our secrets? Announce that for whatever reason we’ve apparently been left on our own to sink or swim, and we’re sinking?”

  Marta shook her head. “Of course not. There’s no need to cause a panic. But I do think these city meetings are worse than pointless. You’re deliberately wasting some of our best resources.”

  “We’re not wasting anyone. We’re disposing of troublemakers,” the long-faced man said. “We must address this present crisis, and to do so we must rid ourselves of those who would, for for whatever reason, stand in our way. The ones who would be sentimental and thus destroy us.”